I am glad that leap seconds are gone, but also annoyed that they ever existed. Time zones are typically an hour wide, some places use the same time zone for geographic regions that span 2-3 1/24s of the Earth's rotation.
This means, simply as an artefact of not living exactly at the centre of a time zone region, the offset between high noon and clock noon is likely to be at least half an hour, possibly over an hour.
Leap seconds correct for the fact that this may have drifted an additional 1-2 seconds in a year. It's second level precision in a thing where the accuracy is measured in tens of minutes.
And that extra precision came with a huge amount of complexity that everyone had to deal with.
There are certain neighborhoods in NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, and so on where leap seconds still thrive.
